Animorphs #6: The Capture
Page 9
Tobias said.
The Yeerk surrendered and demorphed.
We waited, as the minutes and hours of the night ticked away. He still hoped for a miracle to save him. But his hunger was a terrible thing, growing with every second.
He laughed.
After that he said nothing to me for a while. It was impossible to sleep. He sat with my eyes open. He was too hungry to rest. The hunger infiltrated his mind. It twisted his thoughts.
I didn’t answer. His time was running out. Let him talk.
The hours passed. An owl left and was replaced by another. The moon went down. Dawn was coming. I could feel it.
I was watching his pain from far away. I was an observer. Close enough to know what he was feeling, but feeling none of it myself.
At first it was wave after wave of pain. Starvation and death by thirst. All rolled into one agony.
The sun came up. Cassie stepped into the shack from the woods outside. She looked at me and nodded. “It’s happening, isn’t it?”
I wanted to answer, but even now, my voice was not my own.
Cassie came and sat down beside me. Beside us.
“Ax says this part is pretty rough. Just remember, when it’s all over, I’ll be here.”
She slipped her hand into my hand. I could feel it. So could the Yeerk. But he did not reject this small bit of comfort, even though it was intended for me and not him.
His mind was deteriorating. His thoughts were becoming more visible to me. Like a movie that kept drifting in and out of focus.
I saw images from a strange place, as seen through strange eyes. Liquid all around. Shapes, like squids, shooting through the liquid. Yeerks. Swimming in the Yeerk pool. Soaking up Kandrona rays.
And there were images of the first host. A Gedd. So, I thought — that’s what a Gedd looks like. I had seen a few aboard the Yeerk mother ship but had not known what they were. They were humanoid, short and stooped, with webbed feet and three clumsy fingers.
I saw the world as the Yeerk had seen it, through Gedd eyes. The vision was dim. The hearing was better. The Yeerk had been excited at getting his first host. He had subdued the Gedd mind with ruthless ease, crushing it with his superior intelligence and will.
The memory made me sick. The Gedd’s bewilderment. His fear. And the Yeerk’s fierce arrogance.
I turned my attention away from the memory and back to the world around me. To my surprise, I noticed that my arms were shaking. My legs were shaking.
Cassie had put her arm around my shoulders.
“Jake, if you can hear me, it’s almost eight. One hour to go. Jake … the Yeerk in your head is dying.”
“Yes,” I wanted to say. “He is.”
The fugue.
The final hours of the Yeerk’s life. I was watching him die.
A lot has happened to me since I first saw the Andalite prince land in that construction site. More strange things than happen to most people in their entire lives. But the strangest was this. And the saddest.
The Yeerk cried in pain, again and again. And the visions came floating up, crystal clear, as if they had just happened.
Visions of the good times in the Yeerk’s life. And of bad times. The emotions were strange. Alien. I guess that’s the word for them. There was no memory of love. I guess Yeerks don’t do love. But there was affection. Pride. Fear. Regret. Those I could understand.
And along with the Yeerk’s own memories, I began to see the minds of his hosts. The Gedd who had a name no human could hope to pronounce. The Hork-Bajir warrior who had fought the Yeerk in his head every day of his life.
The Hork-Bajir who had been forced to attack his own kind, to destroy his own friends, as an unwilling slave of the Yeerks.
But it was more than just memories. It was more. The Yeerk had carried with him some small part of that Hork-Bajir warrior’s being.
Like a computer transferring a document onto a flash drive, I realized. Part of the Gedd and part of the Hork-Bajir had been transferred permanently to the Yeerk.
And to my shock, I knew that those parts were now being transferred to me.
And then … the memories I feared most.
Tom.
He had joined The Sharing for a simple, silly reason. A pretty girl he liked was a member. He had wanted to get close to her. He had gone to meetings. He’d played along with them, never guessing the truth. All he had cared about was the girl.
He had stumbled, accidentally, into a secret leadership meeting. He thought the girl was seeing another boy. But she was one of them.
He had followed her, wandered into the meeting, and seen Visser Three. Visser Three in his Andalite body.
I saw the Controllers grab a yelling, punching, kicking Tom. I saw as they tied him up. Carried him through secret passageways to the great, underground Yeerk pool.
I saw him scream as he realized what was happening. I felt his fear. I felt his rage as the Yeerk slug crawled into his ear and wrapped itself around his brain. I felt every ounce of his despair.
And like the Gedd and the Hork-Bajir, this human, my brother, became a part of me. The Yeerk was no longer in pain. It was beyond pain.
I opened my eyes and looked at Cassie. It happened so naturally. I opened my eyes. By my own will.
I don’t know how she knew, but I guess she did. She nodded slightly and met my gaze.
For the first time in more than an hour, the Yeerk spoke.
The Yeerk shuddered. I could feel it. A physical spasm. My vision changed. I felt … it’s hard to describe. I felt as if I were seeing through things. Into things. Like I could see the front and back and top and bottom and inside of everything all at once.
And then I saw it.
A creature. Or a machine. Some combination of both. It had no arms. It sat still, as if unable to move, on a throne that was miles high.
Its head was a single eye. The eye turned slowly … left … right ….
I trembled. I prayed it would not look my way.
> And then it saw me.
The eye, the bloodred eye, looked straight at me.
It saw me.
It SAW me!
No! NO! I cried in silent terror. I looked away.
And when I opened my eyes again, all I saw was a weird glow.
The glow faded, little by little.
I was trembling.
“It’s over, Jake,” Cassie said.
I rose slowly to my feet. I moved my own legs. I was in control of myself again. I looked down on the wooden floor of the shack.
A gray slug, not six inches long, lay there … still.
As we watched, it withered and shriveled and became nothing.
Jake? Sweetheart, are you all right?” my mom asked me that night at dinner.
I looked up. I’d been staring at my food, I realized. Something with pasta and tuna fish.
“What?” I asked.
My mom and dad exchanged one of their “worried parent” looks. “Well, you’re not eating. Don’t you like it?”
I shrugged. “Sorry. It’s fine. I was just … distracted.”
My dad nodded. “It’s just a change from the last two nights. You’ve been eating like you were trying to eat everything in the house.”
“I was?”
Tom cocked an eyebrow at me. “What, now you’re going to pretend it didn’t happen? Last night you sat here and ate six pieces of chicken and kept yapping about how great it was. Then you ate a pie. A pie which was supposed to be for the four of us.”
I hid a smile. Of course. Ax. The Andalite had played me for three days — two hours at a time. Ax was dangerous around food. The sense of taste was still totally amazing to him. When he was in human morph you didn’t want to get between him and a bar of chocolate. Or a pie, I guess.
“You were a total pig,” Tom said. “Chicken. Corn. Potatoes. Or, as you kept saying, ‘Potatoes. Toes. Tay-toes.’ I thought you’d gone nuts.”
And were you suspicious, Yeerk? I thought, looking at my brother. A new Yeerk was in Tom’s head. Another arrogant master of the galaxy.
My brother was trapped in a small corner of his own mind, able to see and feel, but powerless to do a thing. I knew.
I didn’t sleep much that night. I did not want the dreams to come. I feared terrible nightmares of the eye. The eye that had stared at me from a different universe.
But the only dream that came was a familiar one.
I was the tiger. My brother was the prey. But, in the end, I was my brother. And he was me.
On the news that night there was a small report on the closing of the new hospital. There was no explanation. But I knew what had happened. The Yeerks knew their plan was blown. They understood that we knew about it.
We had hurt them pretty badly.
But I knew better than to celebrate. Visser Three would be more determined than ever to stop us.
The next day I did something stupid. At least, Marco kept telling me it was stupid. But he didn’t object very much. He understood.
We all met at Cassie’s barn. And I used her dad’s cell phone to call Tom at home. I went partly into a wolf morph before I did. Just enough to make the smallest changes.
Enough to change the shape of my mouth and tongue and throat. So that my voice would sound very different.
He picked it up on the third ring. “Yeah?”
“I have a message,” I said in a thick, twisted voice that did not sound at all like me.
“What?” Tom asked.
“Don’t give up, Tom. Don’t ever give up.”
I hung up before he could say anything.
“Do you think Tom … the real Tom … heard it?” Rachel asked.
“He heard,” I answered.
I wondered if he would have the strength to hold on.
But I knew the answer. See, a part of my brother was in my own mind now. Along with echoes of a long-dead Hork-Bajir and a simple Gedd. And yes, even a bit of a Yeerk with dreams of glory.
Marco smiled his sardonic smile. “And is it true? Will we win?”
“This is a very complicated planet, Marco. That’s what I hear, anyway. And it’s a very strange universe. Anything could happen.”
The sticky red whip of the Taxxon’s tongue stopped moving.
But it was more than that. Nothing was vibrating against my antennae. There were no sounds. There were no smells, because the air itself had stopped moving.
Then, without meaning to, I began to demorph.
I swiftly grew larger and larger. My center pair of cockroach legs dwindled and disappeared. My lower legs swelled and grew skin.
I fell from the Taxxon’s tongue to the ground, too large and heavy to be stuck any longer.
Toes appeared. Fingers appeared. My true human eyes opened.
I looked around, dazed and disoriented.
The others were all there. We were all human again, barefoot and dressed in our skin-tight morphing outfits, like we always were when we came out of a morph.
Ax was back in his Andalite body, just adding to the general weirdness of the scene.
We were inside a building. As we had guessed, it was a lunchroom. There was a kitchen to one side. There were a dozen long tables down the middle of the room.
People sat at the tables, eating. Only … they weren’t eating. They were holding forks. They were looking down at plates of food. They were getting ready to speak. They were holding mugs of coffee.
But no one was moving.
No one was breathing.
K. A. Applegate’s ANIMORPHS series has sold millions of copies worldwide, and alerted the world to the presence of the Yeerks. She is also the author of the bestselling Remnants and Everworld series, Home of the Brave, and the Roscoe Riley Rules series.
Copyright © 1997 by Katherine Applegate
Cover art by Craig White
Cover design by Steve Scott
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This edition first printing, March 2012
e-ISBN 978-0-545-39223-5